Three Poems by Lauren Clark

CARMINA 5

I translate the famous Catullus poem three times. Not the one about give me a million

kisses, but the other one, the one where Catullustravels across the world so

he can bury his drowned brother. Useless stuff starts piling up everywhere

—casseroles, cookies, condolences, bouquets. I am the cookies. I am the flower

arrangements, I am the one writing this, I am the church where I pray. Please God,

stay with me until I die. Without you I am unsalvageable, my family is dead. The funeral,

when it happens, is late and offensive, ridiculous as a wedding cake.

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EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE

A dad puts his arm around you while you watch the gullsswoop for scraps of tourists’ food and tells you he is proudof your capacity for feeling.

He does not want to see you hurt, he says, because you aresmart and good, and still learning, so hurt is a waste of timeand, though when he died previously

the only feelings were relief and sorrow, but mostly relief,you realize you have missed him. You don’t biologicallyinherit anything from this dad

but he puts his arm around you anyway, there, and thenagain to steer you away from the ship’s railing, and againonce you’re back on the mainland,

and again, years earlier, in a train station in rural Illinois,and once he takes your hand in an Indian restaurant withfogged up windows. Once

he races a snowstorm to pick you up from an airport in hissalt-specked minivan, and once he takes your photographand it looks like you. Once he dies

after you lived a nice life togetherwith no violence

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LOVE LAKE (WOLVES)

You were never at the lake,but you were near it the night you found an old shotgunand did with it a number of things I’m not going to say in this poem.

That part is your story.What happens next belongs to the wolves.

They come through the blue of trees and winter, towardthe rectangular light of the cabin’s long plate glass windowbeyond which your friends, deeply in love, sit on a couch.Projected as if in a movie theater. Presented as if on a platter.

And the wolves in their fur—skin so dense and coarseand full of things most of us cannot imagine—move forwardand forward, into the light and unseen. Glass reflects the litbodies of the friends, the sofa on which they sit, the pianosilent behind them, the remains of their dinner waitingin the kitchen, back at them. All they see is their ownparallel bodies.

It looks like love but it is wolves watching.They could bound through that plate glass any momentfor dinner, and suffer no bodily injury whatsoever,and though it didn’t happen at Love Lakethat’s what it has to do with Love Lake.